Shadow fleets and train disasters: What Greece brings to the EU’s top transport job

BRUSSELS — The country accused of providing ships to Russia’s shadow tanker fleet and which has yet to deal with a rail catastrophe that killed 57 is now in charge of the European Union’s transport portfolio.
Greek politician Apostolos Tzitzikostas, 46, was named Ursula von der Leyen’s nominee for transport commissioner on Tuesday — an appointment that was widely expected in the mobility sector.
Tzitzikostas is a member of Greece’s ruling conservative New Democracy party, affiliated with the European People’s Party (EPP), and is considered a hard-liner on domestic politics and national identity — including on Greece’s long-running name dispute with North Macedonia. He has also been accused of cozying up to the far right, such as when he invited the now-defunct, extreme-right Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in 2013 to a public holiday parade in Thessaloniki. 
That track record may raise some eyebrows in the European Parliament, where Tzitzikostas — along with the other Commission nominees — will have to present his priorities and answer questions from MEPs before facing a confirmation vote.
Members of Parliament will have a lot of issues to delve into.
Greece’s government has yet to close the case of a deadly February 2023 train crash that caused a political backlash over its handling of the case and attempts to cover it up. 
The government dismissed a call from the European public prosecutor to take action over the potential criminal liability of two former transport ministers after the crash, while Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis accused European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi of exceeding her powers. Tzitzikostas was not involved.
Tzitzikostas’ nomination cements Greece’s hold over the EU’s transport file; Greek MEP Elissavet Vozemberg-Vrionidi, also in the EPP, is the chair of the Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism.
Maritime issues will also likely be a point of debate during Tzitzikostas’ nomination process. Greece is the world’s leading shipowning nation —responsible for 20 percent of global cargo capacity, according to consultancy McKinsey.
Several hundred of those vessels — many reflagged or sold to Russian interests — are operating as part of Russia’s shadow fleet that carries crude in violation of international sanctions, according to a report by S&P Global.
In addition to allowing Moscow to evade Western sanctions, which supplies cash the Kremlin needs to keep waging the war in Ukraine, the lightly regulated shadow fleet also poses safety problems.
Tzitzikostas will be under pressure to show that Greek companies are willing to break free of their ties to Russia.
Tzitzikostas can lean on his long political experience in his grilling from Parliament. He was elected to the Greek parliament at the age of 29 and continued as governor of the Central Macedonia region starting in 2013.
As well as issues from his native Greece, Tzitzikostas is also likely to be grilled on key areas of his new job: The EU’s phaseout of combustion engines by 2035 and the growing political pressure to water down that goal, as well as next year’s emissions reduction target that the car industry warns could cost it €15 billion in fines. Tzitzikostas has not been vocal on that issue, but the EPP is keen to weaken the 2035 target.
Other key areas include the long-running Single European Sky effort to reform air traffic control, beefing up the bloc’s military mobility capacity to make it easier to ship equipment across the bloc, expanding the EU’s charging and hydrogen refueling capacity, and continuing the push to decarbonize the bloc’s transport. The EU has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions from transport by 90 percent by mid-century, and a lot of that will have to come from shipping — a key concern for Greece.
 Mitsotakis expressed his “great satisfaction” with Tzitzikostas getting the transport and tourism portfolio.
In a lengthy Facebook post, he noted that the post includes tourism, which is a great success for Greece, which “managed to convince the European Commission that tourism deserves its own place in European policies and its place is Greek.”
Tzitzikostas became a familiar face in Brussels during his presidency of the European Committee of the Regions — an assembly of local and regional representatives who advise the EU — from 2020 to 2022, a period marked by the pandemic and the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 
Tzitzikostas didn’t miss a chance to use his post as head of the committee to make his voice heard within the EPP — supporting candidates in local elections, such as Spaniard Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Madrid region. 
Fluent in English and French, he studied at Georgetown University in the United States and at University College London, before returning to Greece to start a dairy company.
His father, Georgios Tzitzikostas, also considered a hard-liner on national issues, was a minister in the early 1990s in the government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, father of the current Greek PM.
The two second-generation politicians faced off in the first round of New Democracy’s leadership election in 2015, when Mitsotakis came in second and Tzitzikostas third. In the second round, Mitsotakis won the leadership of the center-right party, also thanks to Tzitzikostas’ support. Sending Tzitzikostas to Brussels removes a potential rival to the prime minister.
After June’s European election, where New Democracy underperformed, Greek media suggested that Tzitzikostas might defect and create a new right-wing party. However, he stayed with New Democracy.
Calling the nomination a “positive for Europe, particularly for the southeastern member states,” Romanian MEP Adrian-George Axinia commented on Athens’ stake in maritime issues as a benefit in having a Greek at the transport helm.
“We hope the new transport commissioner champions technological neutrality, ensuring combustion engines aren’t banned in 2035 and the Commission proposes carbon-neutral fuels for these engines,” Axinia said. “We expect the commissioner to moderate the push for electrification and reconsider stricter decarbonization targets.”
This article has been updated with PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ reaction to the appointment.